Museum Lust
bioephemera | July 4, 2008
GONE
Isabella Kirkland, 2004
The sixty-three species painted in Gone have all become extinct since the mid-1800's and the colonization of the new world.
Isabella Kirkland's Taxa series are beautiful, intricate, large-scale indictments of humanity's destructive potential. Drawing stylistic cues from 17th and 18th century European still lifes, Kirkland's huge oil paintings depict species driven to extinction or near-extinction, introduced/invasive species, and illegally traded species.
GONE (detail)
Isabella Kirkland, 2004
Each of the paintings is accompanied by an outline key that…
bioephemera | June 20, 2008
"Peep Julius II Questions Michelangelo's Artistic Judgment"
Jean Kaleba and family
Last Friday I finally made it to Artomatic, a month-long gallery event that colocalizes hundreds of local artists under one roof, together with musicians, poets, wine and beer. But the real stars of Artomatic were pastel marshmallows - yes, Peeps.
In conjunction with Artomatic, the Washington Post sponsors a Peep-populated diorama contest, Peepsomatic. The entries were creative, hilarious, and occasionally esoteric, like Jean Kaleba's entry above, "Peep Julius II Questions Michelangelo's Artistic Judgment" -…
bioephemera | June 2, 2008
Grand Ballroom ceiling
Duke Energy Center
I'm at the NIDA Blending Conference at the Duke Energy Center in Cincinnati for two days. Honestly, when I heard I'd be coming to Cincinnati for this meeting, I wasn't optimistic, and when I realized I'd be only 20 miles from the infamous Creation Museum, I was horrified. But it turns out that Cincinnati - at least downtown Cincinnati - is charming, especially on a sunny June day. After obtaining delicious, much-hyped Graeter's ice cream (try the tangerine!) at Fountain Square, I headed over to the Contemporary Arts Center (which is free Mondays…
bioephemera | May 2, 2008This entry originally appeared November 24, 2007 on the old bioephemera. I was inspired to repost & update it after seeing this post over at Morbid Anatomy earlier this month.
Wounds (2007)
Nicole Natri
I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, "When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum," by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it's roundabout, so bear with me.
Dr. Hoffmann's talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner's…
bioephemera | April 27, 2008
. . . wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included. . . [Bacon]
Welcome to the sixth edition of the Cabinet of Curiosities carnival. Whether your taste runs to Wunderkammern or Curiosities, blogs are treasure rooms for modern collectors of the strange and marvelous. Let's start with this perfect miniature cabinet of crochet motifs by JPolka at the oh-so-aptly named…
bioephemera | April 7, 2008
Untitled (labrador), 1995
Stuffed labrador, polyester
Merijn Bolink
Reader Jan-Maarten kindly directed me to the artwork of Dutch sculptor Merijn Bolink:
In Untitled (labrador) from 1995, a stuffed female dog is followed by a bevy of small plastic dogs -at first glance the host of little ones appears to be puppies, but close inspection reveals each to be a dog-shaped replica of the large dog's internal organs. (Charlene Roth, New Art Examiner)
Untitled (Mondriaan branch), 2005
wood
Merijn Bolink
Bolink also grafts twigs to create branching patterns that combine the organic and the…
bioephemera | April 4, 2008
It looks like the British Museum has a good chance of keeping this medieval brass astrolabe quadrant on public display in the UK. The export license for the device has been delayed until June, giving the BM a chance to raise its 350,000-pound selling price - which should please retrotechnophiles and Chaucerians alike.
The astrolabe originated with the Greeks, but was popularized by Islamic astronomers and became widely used across Europe. The British Museum already has several, like this pretty one I saw last summer:
Brass astrolabe with silver inlay, 1712
British Museum
So why do they need…
bioephemera | March 17, 2008
Nancy Fiddler with her mastodon skeleton
photo by Robert Galbraith
So apparently there's a week left to place your ebay bid on the Rustler Ranch mastodon skeleton. It's only $115K, and ebay helpfully notes that you can get "up to $25 back with ebay MasterCard"! So get out $114,975 (plus shipping) and start planning your new fossil decorating scheme.
The skeleton was discovered in 1997 by ranch hand Eric Pedersen on land belonging to Roger and Nancy Fiddler. But the Fiddlers are finding their fossil charge cumbersome:
The mastodon is so big that it's been separated into pieces and covered in…
bioephemera | March 12, 2008
Glove map of London, 1851, by George Shove. Printed map on leather.
(via Mapping the Marvellous)
Long before Googlemaps on an iPhone or handheld GPS devices, there was this very analog Victorian Glove Map! (I already posted this wonderful glove on the old bioephemera, but was inspired by a recent conversation with my boss to revisit it.)
During the AAAS meeting last month, Stanford's Barbara Tversky showed an illustration of a technique used by Native Americans to remember maps, in which the outline of the hand symbolized the local coastline. I tried to dig up the original reference, but…
bioephemera | March 11, 2008
World Map (detail)
Martin Waldseemuller, 1507
Last week I had to visit the Library of Congress, so I dropped in on the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemuller. The map, which was acquired by the Library in 2003, is tucked in behind an exhibit of mesoamerican artifacts, which seemed arranged specifically to baffle visitors. Both 1507 and 1516 maps by Waldseemuller are kept in large vertical cases at the back of the exhibit hall, invisible from the entrance; during my visit, only tourists shepherded by docents found their way around the other exhibit's margins and into the quiet, dim map room. This…
bioephemera | March 3, 2008
St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, DC; wall of Room in Ward Retreat 1
Reproductions made by a patient, a disturbed case of dementia precox [praecox?]; pin or fingernail used to scratch paint from wall, top coat of paint buff color, superimposed upon a brick red coat of paint. Pictures symbolize events in patient's past life and represent a mild state of mental regression. Undated, but likely early 20th century.
I saw recently that the National Museum of Health and Medicine has released a flickr stream of images from its archives, but I hadn't had time to really delve into them. I finally…
bioephemera | February 28, 2008
"Fetus Egg"
The Museum of Food Anomalies
If you've ever seen Darwin's face on a piece of toast, or a midsaggital brain section in a Michelangelo, you'll love MoFA, a repository of culinary pareidolia.
bioephemera | February 25, 2008
Ron Pippin at Obsolete
One of my favorite mixed-media artists, Ron Pippin, just completed a stunning wonder cabinet of a show at Obsolete Gallery. Browsing the interactive panoramas on his website is like tiptoeing through the workshop of a slightly unbalanced Victorian scientist.
Book #8
Ron Pippin
In his latest work, Pippin creates altered notebooks worthy of some jungle-crazed alternate-history Darwin, ominous glass specimen boxes, and flying half-biological automata of uncertain purpose. If you're in the Laguna Beach area, you can see his work in person at Trove.
Ron Pippin's website…
bioephemera | February 25, 2008Well, this is funny. A new illustrated book about wax anatomical models - long one of my favorite topics - is about to be released. It's called "Ephemeral Bodies." Hey, did I write this book? I don't remember doing it. . . but who knows, it's been a crazy year.
The blurb:
The material history of wax is a history of disappearance--wax melts, liquefies, evaporates, and undergoes innumerable mutations. Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since…
bioephemera | February 19, 2008The following is my most popular post, by far, from the "old" bioephemera (originally published Jan 5, 2007). I'll do a repost each week for the next few weeks to give new readers a taste of the blog. . .
Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman
Stephan Zick, 1639-1715
Wood and ivory
Kunstkammer Georg Laue is a Munich antique/art gallery informed by the sensibility of the "wonder cabinets" (kunst- or wunder-kammer) of 17th century Germany. One of the interesting objects described on the site is this ivory model of a pregnant woman with removable parts, including internal organs and a…
bioephemera | February 13, 2008
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
From Paluzzi et al., Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2007
For a few years, Nature Reviews Neuroscience stuck to a humorous theme in its cover art: everyday objects that mimic brains. A dandelion, spilled wine, a rock, a cave painting: if you know what features to look for, a surprising number of things resemble brains. We are a species that sees faces on the Martian surface and the Moon; we're very good at pattern recognition, and it's probably evolutionarily better for our brains to err on the side of "recognizing" something that isn't there, than…
sb admin | February 7, 2008
Tragopogon pratensis
Edvard Koinberg
Herbarium Amoris
Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe.
This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking.
Tulipa;…
bioephemera | February 7, 2008
Tragopogon pratensis
Edvard Koinberg
Herbarium Amoris
Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe.
This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking.
Tulipa;…